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Updated June 19, 1996 12:01 a.m. ET

From "The End of Science" page 81:

[John] Wheeler was one of the first prominent physicists to propose that reality might not be wholly physical; in some sense, our cosmos might be a participatory phenomenon, requiring the act of observation--and thus consciousness itself. In the 1960s Wheeler helped to popularize the notorious anthropic principle. It holds, essentially, that the universe must be as it is, because if it were otherwise, we might not be here to observe it. Wheeler also began to draw his colleagues'...